National Museum of the Mighty 8th Air Force, 2

 More pix from the National Museum...

A diorama of the August 1st, 1943, low-level Ploesti oil refinery raid; mostly
the 9th Air Force, operating from Libya, with three groups of 8th Air Force
B-24s; perhaps the costliest mission in the air war, at least on the US side;
Operation Tidal Wave; many more raids on Ploesti were to follow

Still in the hangar...a P-51 Mustang...enough performance and range

to escort the heavies deep into Germany and shoot down the German 109s

Descriptions of the various crew members...navigators and bombardiers
were in the same pay grade as pilots...!

1942 recruitment film

Not his only aviation film

I have the sheet music, from the pianist of the family, my mother

The lucky ones who jumped and survived...and spent the rest of
the war in a POW camp...like one of my first bosses, Charles Cole,
a P-51 pilot...

Memphis Belle...sad beginning, sad ending...

Memphis Belle crew...first to make it through 25 missions...80% didn't...

Stained glass for Vicki

8th Air Force fighter aces, mostly P-51s, some P-47s

Tuskegee Airman...WACs

My introduction to all this, FWIW, was from one of

my father's books--he worked in the aviation industry in

the early 1940s, building B-24s, before joining the USAAF

and working on B-29s--much to my surprise, The Aircraft

Yearbook for 1943, is up on the web in PDF--I hadn't looked

at its pages since junior high school...

National Museum Of The Mighty 8th Air Force, 1

It would hardly be Christmas without a visit to the local military/war museum, right? So Saturday, after packing up and taking Rachel to the airport, Vicki and I carried on to Savannah's National Museum of the Mighty 8th Air Force, I touring the museum and she waiting patiently in the car. We'd driven past the museum on I-95 numerous times, wondering why it was in Savannah and not in, say, the UK. Well, the 8th was formed in Savannah in 1942, and the rest is history. Great history. Great museum, too.

Entrance to the museum

Very ample interpretive stuff throughout

Click to enlarge and read about the early history of the 8th

Helpful model of a WWII airfield in Britain; we've visited quite a few
over the years, including Duxford, the greatest of them museum-wise

Aptly named...the Brits insisted on night-time bombing, wherein the bombs
often landed in the right county, although the planes and crews more often
returned; the 8th suffered horrendous losses, especially early on, but they
hit their strategically-important targets... 

Pride of the museum, the "City of Savannah," B-17G

This what they meant by "strategic"...the Schweinfurt ball-bearings
plant produced virtually all the ball-bearings used in the German war
effort; knocking it out was hugely costly in planes and crews...but it
was done

The American heavies in Europe...the B-17 and the B24...
were neither pressurized nor heated...so, despite what Hollywood
portrayed, crews had to wear every ounce of clothing they owned,
and keep connected to the oxygen supply every minute over 10,000
feet...which was most of the multi-hour flights

You can't go in the "City of Savannah"--the B-17 actually
was not a large airplane compared with its successors--but the
museum has created slices of the fuselage for closer views

Though the B-17 is the icon of the 8th Air Force, its show horse, the B-24
was its work horse, flying more combat missions than the B-17 and B-29
combined...JFYI 

Read Stephen Ambrose's Wild Blue Yonder to learn more of the B-24 and
its crews...not least, one George McGovern

At Duxford, in 2009, we got to see the Sallie B in flight and up close;
what a privilege! She may well be last flying B-17

Fun Old-Fashioned Family Christmas, 2025: Christmas Morning on Tybee Island

Matching shirts; literary allusion, of course

Xmas mirth

Completely unrehearsed surprise; our stockings generally are candies
and other small things

But this was a huge tin of Anis de Flavigny that I'd never seen before;
my favorite candy (seen above with normal size available in fine stores
in France); might last me until Valentines Day

A glass from Paris, "Rue Jean Bart," the street "our" apartment is on
in Paris, sixieme arrondissement

And assorted more pix...